Small Genealogy Website GEDmatch ‘Never Expected’ Its Criminal-Catching Use

“Ever since investigators revealed that a genealogy website led police to arrest a man as California’s notorious Golden State Killer, interest in using genealogy to solve crimes has exploded. DNA from more than 100 crime scenes has been uploaded to the same genealogy site. A second man, linked to a double murder in Washington state, has been arrested. This is likely only the beginning.”

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““I never expected anything like this,” says Curtis Rogers, who started GEDmatch along with John Olson. Rogers, who lives in Florida, had no idea investigators were using GEDmatch to find criminals until he saw the news about the Golden State Killer. “My initial reaction was I was upset,” he says. “I didn’t like this use of our website.”

“To track down the suspect, investigators had created a fake profile on GEDmatch and uploaded DNA from a 1980 crime scene, where it matched a distant relative of the man eventually arrested. The weeks after the news hit were a scramble for Rogers: to update GEDmatch’s terms of service, to alert users that law enforcement was searching site, and most of all, to sort out his own complicated feelings on the subject.”

The man exonerated this week is Craig Coley, who spent more than 38 years behind bars in the killings before he was pardoned by Gov. Jerry Brown and released from prison on Thanksgiving Eve last year. He is now 71. DNA evidence has now proven he is innocent.

Craig Coley is NOT the so-called Golden State Killer.

Joseph DeAngelo, who is suspected by officials of being the Golden State Killer, has always been free until he was arrested recently. DeAngelo is believed to be connected to 12 homicides, 57 sexual assaults and dozens of burglaries across the state of California from April 1974 to May 1986. Many of those crimes were committed while the first man, Craig Coley, was in prison.

He has been involved in genealogy for more than 35 years. He
has worked in the computer industry for more than 40 years in hardware,
software, and managerial positions. By the early 1970s, Dick was already
using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards. He
built his first home computer in 1980.